Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Defiance Season 1 Episode 4: The Devil in the Dark

It starts so peacefully and mundanely – a man in the
woods changing his shoes, shoes he keeps in a fancy box and he’s really really
fussy about them – has his peace shattered by engine noises and a lot of
shouting. A group of Irathients on bikes; he ignores them and sets off jogging,
listening to music. Which means he doesn’t here whatever it is moving through
the foliage towards him. Until it bites his leg. Now he starts running – personal
trainer monster will eat you if you don’t beat your personal best! He doesn’t, so it grabs him and drags him away
across the forest floor.

In Defiance, Irisa is practicing martial arts when a
group of Irathient Spirit Raiders arrive to trade, much to the consternation of
the general populace. One of the Spirit Raiders smells some fruit and moves to
put it back and the shop owner tells her she touches, she buys – and that he
lost a brother to a plague the spirit raiders carry. She licks it and puts it
back – and he tries to hack her with a clever, interrupted by Irisa throwing a
knife near his hand. The head of the Spirit Raiders throws some money on the
trader’s counter and they walk away.

The Spirit Leader asks Irisa, calling her Little Wolf, if
she thought they were in danger – Irisa says the storeholder was and they
comment on her badge. While she talks, Irisa looks at the scars on her face and
sees them as open wounds. The Spirit Rider leader reminds her that his offer –
whatever that is – still stands and that she should spend time with her own
kind.

Which is interrupted by her being called out by Nolan to
body in the woods, complete with entrails in the trees. It’s messy, very very
messy. And spotting a butterfly, Irisa has a flashback to something in the
past, something violent. She snaps out of it and Tommy gives her the victim’s
history – Dalton Taggart, who runs a bakery in town.

In town Amanda meets the head of the Spirit Riders
telling him about the complaints she’s been getting. She wants them to stop “provoking”
people. He points out their presence is a provocation to the residents. She tells
him to assimilate and most people will accept him, and she wants him to forget
the past (when
the Irathients were massacred). He doubts it but says they will assimilate,
smile and play nice until the humans turn on them. Again. By which point they
will know enough about Defiance to fight back. She has a case full of items
from every Votan race but Irathient, he says he may bring her a handful of soil
from Defiance, to remind her it’s soaked with Irathient blood.

To Need Want where Kenya is hard at work (this was the least
of the puns I thought of) when something sharp and nasty bursts into the torso
of her client. Nolan arrives with Irisa, Tommy – and Dr. Yewll (yaaay!) who
confirms that by the acid saliva, they have a case of Hellbugs. Nasty critters
that eat marrow and line their nests with flesh. To stop them you have to kill
the matron. Irisa, seeing a US flag tattooed to the man’s body, has another
flashback. She recovers and leaves the room, blaming the blood, Nolan follows
her. He refers to her “episodes” which he thought had stopped but she just
stopped talking about them – they’ve been getting stronger since coming to
Defiance. He starts to lecture her on PTSD while she repeatedly tells him she
knows

Tommy and Dr. Yewll bring more news and sarcasm – a Hellbug
egg sack not normally found outside the nest, and chemicals on both kill sites –
attack pheromones, someone is directing the hellbugs and using them as weapons.

At the Tarr household, Christie has moved in and is
serving dinner, to many compliments from Stahma who is trying to make her feel
very welcome. Datak tries to keep his snark in Castithan – unfortunately, she
speaks it. Christie and Alak leave and Datak complains about how Christie doesn’t
fit in a Castithan household with habits like her bathing alone. He expects
Alak to control her. Stahma pushes that off as future concerns – for first they
need to secure the marriage which means reconciling Christie with her father

Which is what Christie talks about with Alak – Datak may
be an ass but he’s an ass who is there for Alak. Before they can talk further,
two hellbugs attack – Christie fends them off with a lantern until her screams
bring Datak – his nifty glow knife turns into a glow sword.

The Castithans have light sabres. Everyone else bow down.

The rest of the family flees through the back door until
Datak calmly joins them, damp from hellbug fluids, but calm and cocky and more
than a little awesome.

They go to Rafe’s house and the tearful Christie hugs her
father. They all sit down with him with Stahma presenting a heavily edited
version of events that makes Alak the hero. Reconciliation is rapidly on the
way. More nauseating fawning is interrupted when Nolan and crew arrive –
including Dr. Ywell with a scanner that finds Christie and the Tak family have
been doused in the pheromones. They hurry upstairs to wash. Nolan asks Rafe
what he knows about the victims – he had some business dealings with them some
time ago but nothing since. Nolan asks to see the documentation on it.

It takes them all night to dig it up, his filing system
isn’t great, with no computers or databases and Irisa has another episode; she
leaves with Tommy following her while Rafe and Nolan look over the deed for the
land he bought – which they in turn got from an Irathient homesteader. Nolan’s
suspicious since the Irathient apparently signed the transfer in English and Rafe
didn’t check the authenticity of it.

Outside in the fields, Irisa has another, longer, more
severe episode with violent memories that cause her to clutch a shard of glass
so hard she cuts herself, she struggles and cries while Nolan holds her. During
the seizure she has visions of one of the Spirit Riders, the woman with the
facial scars.

Back in town she refuses to see a doctor and goes into Need Want to talk to the
head of the Spirit Riders. He accuses the woman, Rin, of being the one behind
the hellbug attacks. He denies all knowledge but looks nervous. She asks about
the killing of the past, how he took her in and gave her a new name. He doesn’t
understand how she knows but she says she saw it – and he gasps that Irisa is
touched (psychic?) He tells them that Rin said she never saw who killed her parents
but suspects she repressed the memory. He still says he doesn’t know where Rin
is – but he can teach Irisa to use her woo-woo to find out.

1 woo-woo ritual later, with a side order of bong hits
and Irisa has a vision, back to Rynn as a child at the farm. Taggart and Dolan
arrive and kill Rynn’s parents for the land they would later sell to Rafe, one
of them cutting Rynn and scarring her face. The Spirit Rider leader tells her to
see Rynn the woman and Irisa switches from a vision of the past to see Rynn as
an adult riding a bike. She comes out of the vision, knowing where Rynn is.

As they leave, Irisa is angry with Nolan, her visions
were never PTSD flashbacks, they were visions – and a natural part of being
Irathient. She’s an alien and Nolan’s treating her as a human made her afraid
of that. She shuts down his attempt to talk about it, grabs some guns from the
lawkeeper’s office and says they need to stop Rynn

Tommy, Nolan, Irisa and the Spirit Riders leader head
down the mine, though he doesn’t want to hurt Rynn, he goes with them because
the gods wish it. They go even further down than the bottom floor to a huge
cavern crawling in hellbugs. And a giant matriarch

Tommy sets to fixing the lift while Irisa and Nolan set
explosives to kill the matriarch and block them in – the spirit rider looks for
Rynn, but she finds him, shooting him in the leg. She’s carrying a box of
pheromones, she drops them, everyone dies.

They talk about Irisa’s sight and she tells Rynn her
vengeance is already fulfilled. She asks Rynn if this is how she honours her
parents – Rynn says yes and throws the pheromones and Irisa stabs her with a
throwing knife. Nolan grabs the attack pheromones and throws it at the
matriarch to encourage the swarm of hellbugs to attack the hive mother. They escape
in the lift and as it rises Nolan shoots the explosives, collapsing the tunnel
behind them

Back at the mayor’s office, Amanda announces that the
land will return to the original Irathient owners – which in turn will be
leased back to Rafe’s mines. So he still gets to use the property he was party
to cheating the Irathients out of. Amanda considers this righting an old wrong
and upholding Defiance’s values and Christie is so proud of her father.

In the prison the Spirit Rider chief and Rynn talk, about
her parents, the sight, the gods and her going to prison. Later, during the
musical dénouement, he goes to talk to Irisa in Need Want and Nolan looks a
little put out. And Rafe takes Christie back to the Tar house to see Alak.

This is the resolution? More “assimilation” (i.e. become
like us and take abuse) talk from Amanda. Rafe used land that he had to know
was dodgy and he certainly did not checking up on and enjoyed the income for
how many years – and that’s just ignored? Amanda has an interesting
interpretation of justice and righting wrongs. And this whole wrong was only
righted because Rynn started to fight back – and is now going to prison because
she sought resolution no human authority cared about.

This man went into the woods jogging, listening to your
MP3 player… well I’m sure many people today do that because people like trees…
and mud… and outdoorsy stuff. But in
these 3 episodes we’ve seen Nolan attacked by Spirit Riders for shinies and
then be attacked by giant bear/wolf/spider thingsm, hellbugs etc. In this new
world would you go running through the woods?

What isn’t interesting is the Castithan expectation that
a husband will be able to control his wife – why take a species that’s entirely
alien, literally, a species with vastly different customs and beliefs from a
vastly different planet and still saddle them with the same prejudices as we
have?

It seems odd they can see the whole point of how silly it
is to use human medical terms for the alien Irisa and then make Castithan
society so human

As someone who plays the game as well (more on that later) it was good to see
some parallels and related links between the two which was supposed to be one
of the unique elements of Defiance (I’ve killed a whole lot of hellbugs).

With the season finale of Defiance approaching, I know there's many people trying to catch up. You can watch Defiance online hereto catch any episodes you may have missed

NB: I know my
episode numbering is odd. Depending on the source you use, the Pilot was 2
episodes back to back, so was episode 1 & 2. So you may have this episode
down as episode 3.